Why Keeping Salisbury’s Off the Charts Violent and Property Crime, Awful Public Schools, Lack of Decent Jobs, and Such a Secret is Harmful

Posted on May 12, 2018

RFP Staff

♦ Anyone forced to remain in Salisbury because they haven’t been able to unload their house due to the enormous volume of houses on the market knows what’s up. They are not fooled by real estate hucksters, city council members, law enforcement officials with a self-protective penchant for fudging stats, shrinking print newspapers with Downtown real estate holdings, and others who stand to gain from hiding the beef.

• Hiding off the charts violent crime puts people in danger when they go to many areas of the Salisbury where the odds are high that violence is likely to happen day or night.

• Covering up burglaries, break-ins, and vehicular break-ins puts someone at risk for encountering those crimes when they buy or rent homes or start businesses in areas of the city where the risk is high.

• Glossing over or telling parents that the city’s four public schools offer “extraordinary” education when the schools clearly received 3 Ds and an F would put students into extremely poor academic environments.

• Keeping silent about the city’s lack of quality jobs and industry with decent pay will waste someone’s time in renting or buying a home here.

• Staying silent about Salisbury’s very visible unequal distribution of sidewalks, solid waste pickups, road repairs, and police vehicles showing up in a timely manner or at all when called. Many neighborhoods are clearly “have nots”. Take a ride around and see what’s up.

• Keeping mum about the lack of people coming to Salisbury’s ghostly Downtown area with its lack of draws and multitude of vacant storefronts with brown papered windows fraudulently lures greenhorns into leasing buildings with enormous overheads and paying a municipal services district tax making success prohibitive. Businesses who lease some Downtown buildings often go belly up in less than 6 months to a year of struggling from day one.

Hiding the above dysfunctional elements is clearly a form of fraud and leads to a perpetuation of those unfixed challenges. Salisbury’s death rattle occurred several years ago.